


the beauty of our weapons

by tiend



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: ARC troopers - Freeform, Coruscant, Cultural Differences, Gen, civilians are weird, lazy weekends, librarians are awesome, no one likes tarkin, pantorans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-06 13:05:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15195383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiend/pseuds/tiend
Summary: A newly graduated ARC trooper goes over the fence to see Coruscant. At the Cultural Annexe of one of the Republic libraries, a research librarian decides he needs helping. Slice of life fluff with three background massacres, a historically significant blood pool, and a Sith curse carved into the wall.





	1. Chapter 1

The war dragged on, and people stopped coming to the Cultural Annexe. Institutions could barely afford to send staff on essential travel, let alone underwrite a research junket to Coruscant. Even if you could get funding, getting a berth on a GAR escorted convoy was more difficult than getting a tenure-track position in the Core. For the scholars who could make the trip, however, it meant easier access to the Annexe’s resources; usually there was a waiting list for the research carrels. Two years into the war, on this week’s end afternoon, there were more than a few unoccupied.

Sadly for the library’s staff, the academics demands’ had increased to match supply. Yanoiru wearily pushed the cart of materials up the aisle for the impatient Chandrilan in Carrel 32A, ignoring the carved stone arching over her. More interesting was one of the catalogue terminals and the person in armour standing in front of it. One of the clone soldiers. There were some at the train stations, but they were in red and white. This one was in green and grey, had an over-skirt, and some sort of flap arrangement over his shoulders. Importantly, he was also in her part of the Annexe.

He was still standing there when she trundled her way back with an empty cart, still there when she went to collect some limited time resources from 33B, still there after she’d re-shelved them, and still there when 33B wanted them back. 33B, Yanoiru decided, was a horrible person, and probably a plagiarist. She delivered the cache, about-faced, shoved her sleeves up to her elbows, and approached him.

“Excuse me?” she said to the tall figure. The helmet swivelled towards her, the visor opaque black.

“Ma’am,” he acknowledged.

“Are you looking for anything in particular? Can I help you?”

There was a short silence.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I’m nearly done.”

“Oh,” said Yanoiru, obscurely disappointed. She risked a glance around his arm at the screen; whatever catalogue he was looking at wasn’t in Aurebesh. Hopelessly curious, she leaned in further. He didn’t seem to mind, and shuffled away a bit to give her more room.

“The Gree! They’re fascinating, aren’t they?”

“Ma’am,” he said.

“We have replicas of Captain Marrix’s original writings in the closed stacks, if you want to request them.”

“Ma’am, that’s very kind of you but.” There was a longer silence. “Ma’am, I’m not a citizen. I’m a clone.”

Yanoiru’s chin set. “The library,” she enunciated carefully, “is for everyone.”

“Ma’am.”

“Everyone,” she repeated emphatically. “You haven’t even taken anything off the shelves. There’s a carrel in the next section you can use.”

“That’s not necessary, ma’am.”

“It’s this way, please.” Greatly daring, Yanoiru nudged him with her empty book cart. Not necessary, her azure ass. He’d been poring through the catalogue for well over an hour. No one did that for fun.

“Here.” She unlocked 28D, and held the door open for him. It was a small enclosure of translucent transparisteel; between the two of them and the chair there was hardly any floor space left. On the desk was another catalogue terminal, and a translation module, both currently in hibernation.

“If you sit down, I’ll unlock the terminal for you,” she said, shyly. He sat, and edged the chair away from her as she keyed it open, bringing up the catalogue pages.

“You wanted to learn about the Gree?”

Silence. Yanoiru felt like the biggest fool on the planet for pressuring the poor man. He probably had much more important things to be doing. She was trying to muster up an apologise when he spoke, his voice less crisp than before.

“My commanding officer? He named himself Gree. He’s interested in the elder races, ma’am, and I had some free time, so I thought…” He trailed off. It had been a spur of the moment decision resulting from being a loose end in Arca Barracks and realising that the entire planet was outside the fence, and that he was allowed to. Or that no one would stop him, which amounted to much the same thing.

“So it’s more the elder races in general, then?” Yanoiru started re-typing her search terms.

“I was on - on a planet, and there were these stepped buildings - ” he gestured.

“Ziggurats,” Yanoiru automatically supplied.

“- ziggurats,” he repeated, “and they had these carvings all up and down the sides, and I was wondering, it looked like they were painted, once?”

She frowned. “Do you have any pictures?”

“Sort of, ma’am. I recorded some footage on my helmet.”

“If you’ve got it here, we can look at it on a portable, maybe narrow down which cultures it could have belonged to,” Yanoiru said.

“Ma’am, it’s not necessary,” he sounded surprised, as much as she could tell through the helmet filters. “There are citizens waiting.”

She stuck her head out of the carrel. He was right. Still - he was very polite, for a faceless soldier. Much more polite than the Sullustan professor who was tapping their foot by the counter.

“Can you wait here for a little while?” she asked. “Maybe see if you can get the video off your helmet and onto a datachip?” Yanoiru fumbled at her chatelaine, and handed him one of the disposables.

She’d begun to second guess herself again when he raised his gloved hands and took the helmet off, putting it carefully on the desk. His face was much nicer to look at than the visor, she thought, brown skin and some thin white scars snaking back into his curly black hair. Yanoiru beamed at him, forgetting herself, and won a half-smile back.

“I’ll be back soon,” she promised, and turned in the opposite direction from the counter to beeline for one of the other intrastaff comlinks, around the corner.

“Dillu? It’s Yanoiru. Can you take over for me?”

Dillu would, but only if Yanoiru would give them her weekend shifts as well. Most of Dillu’s paycheck went off world to support their extended family; with the Coruscant economy the way it was they would take every spare shift they could.

“Deal,” she agreed. She could do with the time out of this place anyway, maybe go up the Jedi Archives again and get some sunlight.

The man, still helmetless, was tapping away at the catalogue terminal when she got back to the carrel, but he stopped and turned around as she dragged the other chair in.

“What…?”

“For first timers we usually do a walk through of the main catalogues, how to request restricted material, that sort of thing.”

“Ma’am,” he said, “I’ve done the tutorial. You don’t need to waste any more of your time -”

Yanoiru huffed. “It’s not a waste of my time, and the tutorial is terrible, it doesn’t even tell you about the emulators.”

He was frowning at her, puzzled, she thought. She felt horribly self-conscious under those eyes; a Pantoran woman of no great beauty, with wisps of pale lavender hair escaping the flat braids she’d tried to contain it in this morning, and wide sith-yellow eyes. She dropped her gaze automatically; most Coruscanti didn’t like them.

“You think I need help,” he said, curiously.

“I don’t think you’re stupid, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “The Annexe library is old, and so’s the catalogue. The index has never been up to date. If I’m here you’ll learn quicker.”

“All right,” he said, holding out a data chip. “I got the footage off my helmet, but I can’t tell you where I got it from. Opsec.”

She took it gratefully. “It’s a single use chip - the academics are paranoid about their research being stolen. Your secrets are safe with me.”

He tilted his head to one side. “Really? They’re that - uh”

“Oh, yes,” Yanoiru answered with bitter emphasis, slotting the chip into her library portable, and loading the video. “They absolutely are that, and lots of them are more.”

He chuckled. She stopped scrolling through the frames to look at him quizzically.

“It’s not what I expected,” he defended himself.

“I’ve seen more than one fist fight in this very hall,” Yanoiru informed him. One had involved a Wookie, an enraged Chandra-Fan, and a lot of hair pulling. “What did you expect?” He’d gotten some lovely clear shots of the carvings. On magnification she could see some paint caught in the crevices, but couldn’t make out the colour. It was a pity she only had the human visible spectrum to look at.

“Not this,” he said, gesturing to encompass the entire Cultural Annexe. It had started off as a cathedral or vault of knowledge - according to the promotional literature of the time - all warm red-orange stone, and light wood panelling, but successive administrations had layered upgrades on top of restoration on top of reburbishment. The high arches and domes of the ceiling in this hall had been covered in sound dampening foam some two hundred years ago. Everyone thought it was a fire hazard, but they didn’t have the money to replace it, and no-one wanted to deal with the echoes.

“It’s been here for thousands of years!” The ziggurats were stepped quite high, with a small building on top. The number of steps was probably significant, but the base looked to be partly covered in vegetation. That was a lower bound of steps, at least, and what looked to be a partially collapsed ramp up to the summit.

“I haven’t,” he retorted with inarguable truth.

“It’ll begin to feel like it on long afternoons,” she replied absently, and added in horror, “No! Not you! Doing this is fun.” Yanoiru greyscaled the images and pushing an algorithm across to look for light/dark boundaries, trying to tease out the details of the dancing? fighting? figures.

“Doing what?”

“Helping people find things, I guess,” she said. That might be a river deity, on the left. It was bigger than the surrounding figures, and was surrounded by zig-zags. “Helping people find out how to find out things.”

“People like me.”

“Especially people like you.” Honestly, it was like he expected her to have had him thrown out or something. “Did you happened to notice how it was oriented?

“Say again, ma’am?”

“Lots of these sorts of things are aligned with the cardinal directions, so north/south on two faces, and east/west on the other.”

“No, I don’t know, and my helmet’s zerofilling.”

“Pity.” There were some shots of the sky, but it was overcast. She couldn’t even see what type of sun it had, or how many.

“Is it OK if I look for matches for the vegetation?”

“Sure.”

“It’s not a security thing?”

“I don’t think you’re a spy, ma’am,” he said, dryly.

She laughed, and the sound pealed out over the top of the carrel walls. Next door thumped angrily on the divider. Yanoiru shoved her hand over her mouth; how embarrassing! Even the clone was laughing at her, silently, the corners of his mouth quivering with suppressed giggles.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “I think I’ve got some possible matches. The most likely one is the Harappans, if this is their river goddess and these are the mirrored twins, here and here,” she pointed. “Was there at least one more ramp on the other side of the ziggurat?”

“I think so. I’m no Alpha ARC.”

“Um - I don’t understand?”

“Never mind. Harappans, you were saying?”

“Oh, yes. Here you go.” She handed him the library portable, and he was shocked to find the screen filled with pictures of what could have been his ziggurat, but with the edges sharpened, and the walls painted in bright ochres.

“How did you know - this is amazing - this is what it would have looked like?”

“Maybe. We’ll never know for sure. You were standing at the centre of an entire city, did you know?” She leaned over his arm and opened a folder. “It might’ve stretched for klicks.”

“How old -”

“About ten thousand years. A bit older than the Archives.”

“Oh…” he breathed out, face soft with wonder. “What happened to them?”

“We can find out, if you want to - oh, you probably can’t tell me where you were.”

“No,” he said, a little wistfully.

“Hmm. I could see if they had religious or cultural centres, and trace that forward? There’d probably be more information.”

The clone hesitated. “No, ma’am, I’ve taken up too much of your time already.”

“Yanoiru.”

“Ma’am?”

“My name’s Yanoiru,” she said expectantly.

“Ma’am - Yanoiru - thank you, but I’m sure I’m interrupting - “

“No!” she hissed quietly, mindful of next door’s wrath. “This is what the library’s for!”

He blinked, surprised by the intensity of her response. In his experience, people preferred clones to leave as quickly and quietly as possible.

“I want to help you,” said Yanoiru, anticipating defeat, fingers twisting white on her lap.

“My name’s Tane,” he offered, and she looked up, forgetting her sith-yellow eyes, meeting his warm brown gaze.

“Tane,” she said, carefully, sounding out both syllables. “There’s so much information in here - and it’s supposed to be used - there’s no point in collecting anything if people don’t use it, if they don’t think of new questions to ask.”

“My questions aren’t very new, or exciting.”

“That doesn’t mean they don’t matter,” she persisted. “Like - your friend Gree?”

“My commanding officer, Gree,” he said, amused.

“The Gree are very xenophobic, now, but they used to travel everywhere, and we know some of the places they went, because on some planets they still use a blue nonagon to mark clean water, just like the Gree did. Maybe they still do.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Um,” said Yanoiru, whose mouth had outpaced her brain. “I mean, history isn’t even past - that wasn’t supposed to be a joke, don’t laugh - there are pieces of it all over the place if you know how to look. Layers and layers of it on top of itself. I think the Kiffar tattoos are yellow because of some Harappans influence, although I don’t remember why.”

“Like the way they’re always building here?” On Coruscant, the richer you were, the higher you lived. Yanoiru lived far enough down that it didn’t matter that she couldn’t afford windows. No sunlight reached down there.

“Exactly like that, but Coruscant is so fascinating in itself,” Yanoiru said, dragging out the name of the planet, her face alight. “Generally, the lower the level, the older it is, but the lower levels aren’t safe, so mostly I work from maps. We have street maps of Coruscant that are more than fifteen hundred years old, and tourist guidebooks that tell you which districts to visit, and - oh, I’m sorry to go on. It’s a hobby of mine.”

“No, no, it’s interesting. You mean, even though the Harappans have gone, they’re not really gone?”

“If you know what to look for, no, they’re not gone, not completely. Even if they were, you know to record the alignment of any ziggurats you might come across,” she pointed out.

“I do, thanks to you,” he said.

“If you can record in ultraviolet or infrared, you should do that too. Not everyone sees in the human or near-human spectrums.”

“I can’t believe I forgot that. It’s why our armour’s white, did you know?”

“No?”

“It’s made by a species that sees in ultraviolet. It’s not white to them.”

Yanoiru frowned. “Is that secret? My cousin always wondered.”

“Probably not.” There were pictures of clone soldiers all over the holonet these days.

“Do you want to know why it’s yellow?” she blurted. “The Kiffar?”

“I do,” Tane said, and so she helped him - just like he was a citizen! - navigate the labyrinth that was the Annexe catalogue until they found out. From there they got sidetracked by retrocognition and telemetry, which is how Yanoiru found herself leading a clone trooper to the post-graduate lounge.

“There were at least two more, but we don’t know where they were.”

“That’s creepy.” He was looking at the walls as if he expected blood to drip out from behind the wood panelling.

She nodded to the familiar faces, strewn across the battered furniture in various attitudes of exhaustion and despair. None of them bothered moving.

“Just doing the tour,” she explained, and led Tane over to the corner, and pulled up the worn carpet.

“The people killed here had mildly acidic blood, and it ate away at the stone before it got cleaned up. There’s the edge of a pool, there - “ she motioned to the line, etched in the floor. At least it meant the administration made it a priority to keep the room carpeted. Even with the light wells and biolumes the Annexe could get chilly in the mild Coruscant winter. The temperature and humidity controlled sections were reserved for books, not staff members, and especially not graduate students.

Tane, like everyone else, immediately knelt down and touched the edge of the blood pool, where the smooth stone of the floor became rough and pitted.

“If I was from a Kiffar template,” he said, wondering, pulling one glove off to run his bare hand over the texture.

“You might be able to feel someone bleeding to death,” she finished. “This is the only massacre in the Annexe we can definitively locate. Some people think one of the others happened in one of the basement bathrooms, but it’s probably just the plumbing.”

“So people died in here, and now it’s a - a wardroom?” he said, getting to his feet and putting his glove back on.

“Mostly,” guessed Yanoiru. “We can go look at the Jedi graffiti, too, if you want?”

“The what?”

“Someone carved obscenities into a wall with a lightsaber. It’s very distinctive.”

“I’m going to need to record this, or no-one is going to believe it,” said Tane, gleeful. It’d make good video currency.

He spent a few minutes making sure he had gotten some decent shots of the graffiti, and was still laughing when he took his helmet off. Yanoiru thought it made his face look very young.

“You don’t know who did it?”

Yanoiru shrugged. “There’s rumours. I always wanted to think it was Master Yoda after a tragic love affair, but it’s too high up.”

“He could have lifted himself with the Force.”

“Or sat on someone’s shoulders. I asked about it up at the Jedi Temple, once.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. They didn’t really want to know, but it has to have been a Jedi.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“The Sith were eradicated a thousand years ago, and it’s not that old. You can tell by the style of lettering. So it was a Jedi, or the Sith survived and were in my library, and I want to sleep at night.”

“I’ve seen a Sith. Hells, I’ve fought Sith. Lots of us have.” In his experience, you didn’t fight Sith so much as try and distract them long enough that some of your brothers might make cover until a Jedi turned up. Or you died.

“You what?” Yanoiru stopped dead, and swung to stare at him in shock, before she abruptly remembered her sith-yellow eyes, and stared at the floor in shame. He certainly didn’t sound like he was joking.

“They exist,” he said, grimly, and Yanoiru decided not to ask.

Tane was wonderfully quick at learning how to use the various Annexe subsystems; he actually listened, until a large number of people that included the occupant of 33B. The library was so old and the collections so unwieldy no one had ever managed to digitise everything. With the current levels of funding, they couldn’t even manage to bring all the older files up to date. Instead, the Annexe maintained emulators to access the older attempts at digitisation, which worked with varying degrees of ease and accuracy.

“This one’s just high resolution holographs, which can be useful, depending on how good the character recognition algorithms are for whatever it was written in,” she explained. “If you want something searchable, then it’s this, because they got droids to input the entire text. Most of the time it’s the entire text, anyway, since it turned out some of the droids were second-hand from a religious order that thought some things shouldn’t be written down.”

“Why -”

Yanoiru giggled. Quietly. “It’s a question I ask myself daily. But the answer is; because it is. It’s the way it is because it is the way it is. It’s why we don’t have many droids down here. It drives them mad.”

“I never thought I’d sympathise with a clanker,” Tane said ruefully. She’d been right; he wouldn’t have made it this far without her help.

“It’s not all bad, though, is it?” she asked. It was important that he liked the Annexe.

“No,” he said. “It’s not all bad.”

“Not the plumbing,” she said, a faint indigo blush climbing her cheeks.

“I wasn’t talking about the plumbing, no,” he agreed.

They were looking at the findsmen of Gand when the chimes sounded for the last time. Dillu had to come to kick them out of the carrel in person, and she jerked away from Tane guiltily.

“Out,” they said, unsympathetically, with a jerk of their chin. “I want to go home.”

“Sorry, we’re going now!” she apologised, pushing the chair back to where she’d looted it from.

“I can see why you wanted the weekend off,” said Dillu critically, looking at the figure in armour standing - was he waiting for her? - at the inner doors.

“No, I - “ started Yanoiru, before stumbling to a flustered halt. Dillu smiled at her, gently, for all their wide mouth and needle-sharp teeth.

“Go on, Yanya.”

Tane and Yanoiru pushed their way through the outer doors together, and came to a halt in the Annexe plaza.

“Well, then,” she said, trying hard to not be awkward, and twisting her fingers together with the effort. Being with him all afternoon hadn’t seemed much like work at all.

“Thank you,” said Tane, unsuccessfully trying to meet her eyes. “Can I - it’s late - would you mind if - can I walk you to your train station?”

“I - yes. I’d like that,” she replied, still looking down, and so missed the widening smile of disbelief and satisfaction that spread across his face.


	2. Chapter 2

In spite of missing that cue, she somehow managed to invite him back to her apartment before they’d even left the plaza, ostensibly to watch some documentaries about the pioneering urban explorations of old Coruscant. Tane saw her duck her head to hide a pleased smile when he accepted. He wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but given the chance of spending more time with her rather than going back to Arca? It was barely a question.

Tane unclipped his helmet, and fitted it back on again. 

“Regs,” he explained, only partially truthfully. Generally, they bucketed up as soon as they left barracks, and preferred it that way. The helmet’s systems gave them a layer of protection and distance when citizens stared - and they always stared. Walking with a girl was different; maybe he could scrounge civvies off one of the other ARCs. Even now, most citizens wouldn’t recognise a clone if they weren’t in armour.

Having his helmet on meant that he could talk to the Coruscant Guard at the train station. It was a shitty job. Not many brothers liked the looks of fear from the people they had been created to protect. Yanoiru waited patiently, her eyes flicking over their armour from visor to visor and then back down at the ground. He’d noticed she didn’t like making eye contact, which seemed to contradict some of his cultural awareness flash training. 

“This is it,” she said, waving her hands around. Her apartment was small, and looked shabbier than normal to her newly critical eyes. At least it was tidy. “The ‘fresher’s down the corridor on the left. Do you want something to drink? We have lots of tea but it’s mostly Pantoran.” 

“What’s different about Pantoran tea?” he asked, holding onto his helmet with one hand and swinging it absently.

“It’s made from Pantoran plants? I never thought about it before.”

“Maybe water then.”

“Okay.” She brewed some tea for herself, making a note that they had less than a week’s supply of drinkable water left, and came around to sit on the couch, trying to remember where she’d saved the documentaries. There was a series of familiar thuds from the entranceway; her cousin and roommate coming home.

Siamat hadn’t opened the door so much as collapsed against it, head pounding with what threatened to be a migraine. She’d dropped her bag, lost her balance trying to take her shoes off, and hit her head against the wall, the last fucking thing she needed. 

“Fucking fuck fierfek skullfuck a fucking sith.” She clutched the sore spot on her head.

“Siamat? You OK?” Yanoiru called out.

“No. Yes. Fuck me. I’m fried. Can you dim the lights?”

“Sure. You overtanked?”

The lights down the hallway darkened. She thought she could bear walking through to her bedroom now without the biolumes stabbing at her eyes.

“It’s been a bad week.” It had been frustrating; Siamat knew there was a piece missing, some bit of data that would turn her analysis from jagged fragments to a pattern, but she couldn’t find it.

“Oh!” There was a man on the couch; Siamat peered at him in the low light. He looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place him.

“I, uh.” said her cousin.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she told both of them, and went to the kitchen to take a judicious mix of comedown drugs.

“Is she injured?” the man said to Yanoiru. “I have -” he gestured to a pouch at his waist.

“No, she’ll be fine,” said Yanoiru. Raising her voice she added, “She just overworked herself to collapse for the fourth week in a row.”

“If I had collapsed, would I be able to do this?” Siamat retorted, flicking her fingers obscenely back.

“We’re just about to order food,” Yanoiru said with an edge of maliciousness. “I thought something from home, maybe that fish curry you love so much.”

“If you love me, don’t talk about food,” she begged.

Yanoiru, victorious, smiled at her. “Going to sleep it off?”

“Surely am. If I haven’t emerged by the afternoon, check if I’m dead?”

The man jerked a little, calling Siamat’s eyes back to him. She was sure she’d seen him before. Somewhere in the halls of the residential stack? He wasn’t Pantoran, but he could be a halfie. The light was too low to see any blue undertones in his skin.

“Will do. Sleep well, sleemo.” The insult was belied by Yanoiru’s worried frown, although it wasn’t like she was blameless. Siamat had gotten up for work to find her cousin asleep on the couch in a pile of flimsi more than once.

[siamat]  
_going to put my earplugs in now_  
_just so’s you know_  
  
[yanoiru]  
_thanks for the update?_  
  
[siamat]  
_in case you end up making_  
_noise later on_  
  
[yanoiru]  
_filthy woman_  
_we are going to watch holos  
_

Earplugs safely in, she settled into bed, grateful to feel sleep crowding the headache away. Looks like she’d managed to dodge this one. 

Wait. 

Now she knew why the man on the couch looked familiar. Siamat rolled over and propped her comm up, squinting at the screen, tongue between her teeth in concentration.

[siamat]  
_am i hallucinating or was there a_  
_clone trooper in the living room_  
  
[yanoiru]  
_he was lost in the Cultural Annexe stacks_  
_the index is awful and the shelving is worse_  
_how are you still awake ___  
  
[siamat]  
_just had to be helpful_  
_goodness of your heart_  
  
[yanoiru]  
_ppl were pretending he wasn’t there_  
_assholes_  
  
[siamat]  
_total shitbags_  
_good on you_  
_clonefucker_  
  
[yanoiru]  
_go to sleep how are you even typing_  
  
[siamat]  
_very carefully with one eye open_  
_has he got a skirt thing? some shoulder_  
_things?_  
  
[yanoiru]  
_yes, is that important?_  
  
[siamat]  
_not always just curious_  
_headsup tho he might be a virgin_  
  
[yanoiru]  
_whatever very funny_  
  
[siamat]  
_no for real they don’t let them out much_  
_it’s some weird shit_  
  
[yanoiru]  
_out of sight out of mind i guess_  
  
[siamat]  
_just get him out of his armour_  
  
[yanoiru]  
_go away_  
  
[siamat]  
_zzz_

“She was wondering where I met you,” she explained. “I think she’s out for the count now, so it’s only us for dinner. If you want dinner.”

“Will she be all right?” Tane asked, unsure if the cousin had been serious about dying or not. He had some bacta on him - they’d all learned that very early - but hadn’t expected to have to use it on a civilian.

Yanoiru made an inelegant snorting noise. “Siamat works too hard. She just needs sleep, and to stay out of the tank.”

“The what.” 

“The tank? It’s an immersion chamber. Cuts down on distractions, that sort of thing. Says it makes her feel like a fish.”

A different sort of tank, he thought with relief.

“Are you hungry? Dinner’s on me,” said Yanoiru. “I’ve been meaning to rewatch those documentaries for months.”

“I’d like to, but I should check in,” he said slowly. “I’ll comm HQ now.” 

He got up and wandered into the entry way, the skirt-things - Siamat would know what they were called - swaying as he walked. Yanoiru liked them.

“Junker? That you, vod?” he said, very quietly.

“Tane! Where you been? Curfew was hours ago.”

“There was a woman -”

“Didn’t think you had any chips left,” said Junker. “You’re shit at sabaac.”

“No, asshole. In the library. A fucking civilian asked me back to her place.”

“You jammy fuck. You fucking Force-blessed fuck,” said his brother, with a certain amount of awe.

“I’m there now. She wants me to stay for dinner and - can you cover for me?”

“How long is a civvie dinner?”

“She. She wants to show me these holos, right? After.”

“Fuck me sideways. You owe me. Sith have wept tears of blood for less.”

“I know, Junker! I know. She’s -” Tane broke off. She’d wandered up obliquely, blue and soft and bashful, to ask him if she could help. As if what he was doing was important. Then she’d stayed, helping him puzzle out the texts, for hours, until the library closed. “She’s nice,” he said, inadequately.

“Don’t tell me. I don’t care.”

“She lives with her cousin.”

“...I care,” Junker allowed.

“Will you do it?”

“Of course I’ll fucking do it. Do you need me to comm you any diagrams? Instructional holos?”

“Fuck off.”

“Hope you get a rash and your cock falls off, fuckface.” Junker signed off.

Relieved, Tane returned.

“It’s good,” he told her. “I’ve got leave for the next 48 hours.”

“That’s all weekend - we - anyway, dinner? These all deliver.” Yanoiru pushed bits of brightly coloured flimsi at him. 

“What would you recommend? I’m sure all of them are better than rations.” 

“Hmmm,” said Yanoiru. “The local places are mostly Pantoran, but even outsiders like these ones.” 

“I’ll pick three of them, and then you pick the final one,” Tane improvised. He looked them over; some weren’t even printed in aurebesh. He handed her the ones he was most sure of.

“I see.” She hummed a little, in the back of her throat, considering the options. Tane watched her face, the small crinkle between her eyebrows coming and going. He was used to his brothers’ faces. Hers was fascinatingly different. It caught his eyes, somehow.

“I think...this, and this, and this, and there’ll be leftovers for tomorrow.” 

He leaned back, and in defiance of his armour attempted to slouch in the soft, bright cushions. Tomorrow, he thought, turning the idea over in his head. Maybe I might still be here, tomorrow. She didn't seem to be in a hurry to get rid of him, and it wasn't he wanted to go.

Tane hoped so; her apartment was nicer than barracks. Far more welcoming than those scrubbed-clean edges and right angles, even if the barracks had windows and a working lightwell. This place was far enough down to qualify for subsided full-spectrum lighting. They were growing plants for the oxygen boost, so many the air smelled of them, and had put in extra biolumes over some of the shelves.

“So!” said Yanoiru brightly. “These are the documentaries I was talking about, about the undercities of Coruscant. They’re a bit sensationalist, but mostly accurate. For when they were made. Someone managed to get three miles down a couple of months ago and the people there didn’t even know there was a war, although they said their migration patterns had changed.”

Compared to some of the training they’d had on Kamino they were riveting, especially the sensationalist bits, where Yanoiru, intentionally or not, shifted closer to him. Over dinner they talked about Yanoiru and Siamat’s own apartment building - which had been many things, and still was some of them, depending on how far down you went - and the Annexe, which had been constructed like a coffer dam inside the existing structures and was seismically isolated from them.

“It’s even got these big shock absorbers in the basement, to dampen earthquakes or shockwaves or something. The original builders didn’t want to have to reshelve everything, we suppose.”

Tane had never considered why a library would also have to be a fortress, or how dangerous a librarian could be. Yanoiru didn’t look very dangerous - she was rounded and touchable - but he knew what the Kaminoan reaction to her would be. Someone who believed in helping other people find out whatever they wanted to know? It would have been messy, and it might have been fatal.

Somehow he ended up staying the night, after Yanoiru admitted she was falling asleep where she sat. By then it was early enough in the morning that she’d have felt terrible throwing him out - he could look after himself, she was sure, but it wouldn’t be very kind, and they hadn’t finished the series, and she had the weekend free. If he wanted to stay. With her. He did.


	3. Chapter 3

Siamat woke, blissfully free of her headache, and in desperate need of the ‘fresher. She wrapped her robe around herself before pushing the door open and staggering out.

“Shit!”

She stopped. There was a half naked man standing in it, wearing nothing but a pair of thin black leggings. He didn’t look happy to see her.

“Yanya!” she yelled. “I take back anything bad I said about your taste in men!”

“I’m going to the ‘fresher,” she told him. “Get out of my way.” He retreated into Yanoiru’s bedroom, flushing.

[siamat]  
_i’m starving_  
_you? worked up an appetite?_  
_if you know what i mean_  
_and I hope you do_

[yanoiru]  
_sssssssh_  
_got leftovers in coldstore_  


[siamat]  
_fuck no_  
_i’m making pancakes_  
_does whats-his-name_  
_no-shirt want some?_

[yanoiru]  
_Tane_  
_be nice_

[siamat]  
_not as nice as you were_  
_want a caf delivery?_  
_how does tane want his?_  
_I can make up a tray_  
_put a flower on it_

[yanoiru]  
_I said be nice_  
_not creepy_

[siamat]  
_my head doesn’t hurt_  
_fat overtime payout_  
_pancakes_

[yanoiru]  
_he says five sugars_

[siamat]  
_damn and he looked_  
_sweet enough already_  
_gimme fifteen_  
_need hygiene_

She winked broadly at Yanoiru through the crack in the door as she handed her the mugs of caf. Her cousin tried to glare back but failed, a smile curling across her face.

“Hey, Tane?” Siamat asked, pitching her voice over Yanoiru.“You want pancakes for breakfast?”

“Pancakes? What’s that?” He sounded wary.

“I’ll assume that’s a yes, and if you don’t like them, you can eat leftovers,” she decided. Siamat wanted to get a look at his armour in the light; there were only ever a couple of regiments on Coruscant at a time, apart from the ARCs.

Tane did like pancakes; he was briefly confused by the idea that you could put anything you liked into one, and then disappointed to discover that putting everything you liked into one wasn’t a good idea.

“I think you might want to wash your face.” said Yanoiru, giggling. He gave her a horrified look, and dived for the fresher, syrup smeared around his mouth.

Siamat bolted for her cousin’s door. White and - oh. He was an ARC. Her cousin had brought home an ARC.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to know who he’s with.”

“Why not just ask him?”

“Ask him what?” said Tane, face newly clean.

Siamat shrugged uncomfortably. “What unit you’re with.”

“ARC-22-9074, formerly CT-22-9074, 41st Elite Corps.” He came unconsciously to attention as he spoke, spine and face stiff, a jarring contrast against his recent effort in trying to manoeuvre an overfull pancake into his mouth.

“Sorry,” said Siamat, although she wasn’t entirely sure why. “I just wanted to know. It’s a thing.”

“A thing?” he asked after a quick glance at Yanoiru.

“I do info analysis. See what interesting things have shaken loose, try and make sense of it. Like the classified leaks on the holonet?” He nodded. “Stuff like that, I try to figure out how accurate the info is, attribution, downstream effects, that sort of thing. Anyway, there’s a lot of GAR stuff floating around these days.”

Tane said nothing.

“I don’t know that, just enough to know than means you’re with Unduli.”

“Jedi General Master Luminara Unduli.” Tane corrected her.

“Yeah, her,” Siamat squirmed a little. It was different when the war was in their common room and had spent the night with her cousin. “So we compile the info, analyse it, and then sell the feed to whoever.”

“It always seemed to us,” said Tane, sharply, “that citizens don’t like being reminded of the war.”

“Most of them don’t,” Siamat agreed. “But some of the ones that do pay very well for the details.”

“A lot of people like to ignore it, if they can,” Yanoiru added. Not that she’d had that option, living with Siamat. “How much time do you have left, Tane?”

“Uh - some. I’m not due back for a while. Why?”

“She wants you to stay and doesn’t know how to ask,” broke in Siamat, who had recovered.

Yanoiru flushed a little, and looked at the floor, but didn’t deny it.

“I, ah. If it’s OK,” he shifted his weight. “If you don’t - I don’t mean - you have things to do.”

“You’re good,” Siamat reassured him. “Can I be direct?”

Yanoiru snorted. “Never.”

She ticked it off on her fingers. “You’re welcome to stay; but we don’t want to pressure you into staying if you’d rather go; we’ve never had a clo- a soldier over before so we don’t know if you’re bored; you seem pretty nice so you’re welcome to stay; Yanya here wants someone to spasm over history with; I will try not to be a invasive dumbass again.”

“If you’re sure,” replied Tane.

“We’re sure,” said Siamat, resisting the urge to elbow Yanoiru in the side.

“What are you going to do?” Yanoiru asked her.

Siamat shrugged. “Do some baking, do some washing. Might set off some crawlers, do some data ratting for a while.”

“Not work! Not again!”

“I’ll charge them for it! It’s just - something’s missing, and I don’t know what it is, but I can see the shadow it makes.” Her finger unconsciously curled into grasping motions.

“My squaddie - my friend, I mean - he’s good at that.” Tane blurted. He’d told Junker there was a cousin. She wasn’t as pretty as the librarian though.

“Yeah?”

“It got him pulled for extra command flashes.”

“I have no idea what that means, but why not. Does he accept payment in chocolate brownies?”

“Yes,” said Tane, extrapolating from the existence of pancakes. “Definitely.”

“Deal,” Siamat smiled at him. “You invite him over, and I’ll go make my room look less than like a tooka’s nest.” She disappeared down the hallway.

“I’ll just, uh,” _talk my brother into going AWOL with me,_ Tane completed in his head.

Yanoiru dimpled at him. “They’re really good brownies,” she confided.

Tane smiled back at her before spinning off into a corner.

“Junker?”

“How’s your itch, my tank-wet brother?”

“They want you to come over. The cousin’s a datamonger.”

“Fierfek.”

“And if she thinks you’re smart enough you can have chocolate brownies.”

Silence.

“Can you make it?”

“I’ll crawl if I have to.”

“Sending the address now. You got it?”

“Yeah, yeah, I can make it happen. Fuck.”

“Wait a - “ he covered the comm. “Yanoiru? How does he get into the buildings?”

“Oh - if he can ping you when he’s outside, one of us can go and get him?”

“She said comm me when you’re outside and someone’ll come and get you,” he reported.

“Fierfek fucking fuck.”

“Stay in barracks if you want,” said Tane, without pity, and signed off.

Yanoiru actually looked disappointed, but then she’d never had to share a slit trench with Junker. “Can he not come?”

“I think he’ll make it,” Tane answered, truthfully.

Siamat went to collect him from outside the building, not having the heart to roust Tane off the couch. He and Yanoiru had been slowly collapsing towards each other over the course of the day and had progressed to sharing a blanket in the temperature controlled apartment. By this stage, no hands were visible.

He was very easy to spot, pacing beneath the overhang, his green and white armour bright against the endless grey of the Coruscant mid-levels.

“Hey, you Junker?” she asked, as if another clone soldier was likely to have appeared on their doorstep.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, shifting his helmet to the other arm. His hair was longer than Tane’s, tied back and curling.

“I’m Siamat. Your friend is upstairs, um,” she said, leading him forward. “Did he mention I want you to have a look at some data I have?”

“He did, ma’am,” said Junker, face calm, and stomach churning.

“Right.”

The other two hadn’t moved. although Yanoiru had paused the holo to add commentary. Tane grinned at the newcomer, who immediately started flicking handsign at him. Siamat raised her eyebrows at Tane, who had started signing back. He looked a little abashed, but not much. Not enough to stop.

“This is Yanoiru, my cousin, and seducer of innocent library patrons. The other one is the innocent library patron. You already know him. This way,” Siamat announced, shoulder checking Junker forward. He staggered a bit, but obediently trailed after her, flicking one more sign as he went.

She’d led him to her bedroom. He was in her bedroom. Junker wished he’d thought to leave his helmet feed running in case someone thought he was bullshitting. It was small, and colourful. The bed - her bed - was set high over storage space for clothes. Most of the rest of the room was taken up by an extensive computing setup; an ergonomic couch with rests for the lower arms, and a headset that looked far cleaner than the ones back in the training sims. There was a pattern stenciled on the outside; he’d look it up later.

“How well can you lie down in that get-up?” she asked. “There’s your pauldron, and the sticky-out thingy on the back.”

“Ma’am?”

“Here,” she indicated the couch, shaped like a wave. “If I’m working from home. You need to lie on it so I can get the headset calibrated. Gloves off too, it’s all haptic.”

Junker eyed it warily. It looked a lot more comfortable than the tiered seating on Kamino, but the headset would effectively blind him to his surroundings, and she wanted him to take his armour off. There were no windows, and Tane was between him and the entry point. Tane was almost certainly distracted. Still. He handed her his helmet, feeling oddly unsettled. It would be harder to fit if he left his pauldron and cuirass on, but - he took them off anyway, and made sure to put them in easy reach.

“Hands in here.” It was a tight fit; they were sized for her hands. He’d never tried to wear something that wasn’t sized for him.

She swung the visor across and covered his sightlines; it was expensive enough to have full peripheral coverage. The bootstrap process was all he could see.

“This is the orientation program; just run through it so you’ve got a feel for - yeah, like that. I’m going to dump the pad contents to the headset when it’s finished, layout should be sane, and everything’s tagged correctly. Tell me if you need anything; I’ve got the output duped to a screen.”

“What am I looking for?” This setup was amazing; the display was crisp, and the controls smoothly responsive. It was a beautifully bit of tech, and he wanted it.

“That’d be telling. You’ve got clean eyes; I want to see what you make of it.”

It felt like a test - but reasonable. Junker twitched his fingers, and dove.

Some time later, with the faint ring of a saturation headache, he sat with Tane, sharing the mixing bowl with scrupulous precision.

“Are you okay?” asked Yanoiru from the kitchen. “It’s awful quiet.”

They looked at each other. Junker still looked dazed; it had a been a lot of information. A large proportion of it had been interesting in ways he suspected were above his clearance level.

“It’s really good,” Tane answered for both of them.

“Wait until we ice them.” Siamat sounded amused.

_Ice?_ Junker mouthed, shaving off a careful millimetre from the scrapings left in the bowl.

“Ice them?” asked Tane.

“It’s not really icing. It’s just melted chocolate poured over the top.”

Tane licked batter off the spoon, happily unconscious of Siamat’s frantic gesturing for Yanoiru to pay attention.

“That sounds good.” It was beginning to smell good, warm and rich and complicated.

“Worth going AWOL for,” agreed Junker.

Yanoiru huffed slightly in amusement. “Thanks, but I wouldn’t go that far.”

Tane cuffed his idiot vod around the back of the head. “A bad joke.”

Getting his timing right in the evening was going to be a bit tricky, Junker thought. The spotlight in the northeast corner was still flickering, enough to make the visual compensators in the helmets unhappy, and it was better at dusk when the surface was dark but the sky was still lit. He’d be over the fence before lockdown and none - no officers, anyway - the wiser. Goblin would’ve covered for him.This was probably why the instructors drilled them so hard on establishing a viable exfil.

Tane had been there, as well, but Tane was stripped down to his blacks, lying under a blanket with his head in Yanoiru’s lap. She was absent-minded combing her fingers through his hair, and from the expression on his face it was likely he’d forgotten what exfil even was.

“They’re very cute,” said Siamat, appearing behind the couch. “Do you want to keep watching this?”

“Ma’am?”

“Siamat. Not ma’am. It makes me feel like my mother is causing a scene again.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, are you watching this? Otherwise I dug up some more stuff that seems to corroborate some of the ideas you had.”

Junker swallowed back his disappointment; he didn’t have time.

“I should really be going soon, ma’am - Siamat.”

“Really?” She sounded surprised, if anything.

He turned to look at her, confused. “But I thought -”

“Ssssssh,” hushed Tane and Yanoiru in unison, before glancing at each and giggling. Siamat pulled at him; he followed it and got off the couch. Junker hadn’t been at the bottom of his cohort in close quarters combat; why he followed her - she was so small - so easily was frustrating.

“Did you think you had to leave?” Siamat said. “It’s why I made the extra brownies. For bribes. So you can both stay AWOL. There’s some unopened bottles of whisky leftover from year’s end, too. You don’t have to sleep with me - the couch folds out.”

His mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“I went too fast again, didn’t I?” she asked rhetorically. “Sorry. For our culture, if you left while Tane stayed it’d be rude. We would have been rude. So me and Yanya assumed you were staying over tonight, probably on the couch. It folds out into a bed. My bed’s comfier than the couch, but it’ll have me in it. Which we thought you might not like. If you want to, you can stay in here with me, but we’re not going to have sex. Does that help?”

She was like taking a series of concussion rounds to the chest, he decided. She kept knocking him off balance, and he unconsciously re-centered his weight. Too many new ideas, too fast, fired at him by a person who barely came up to his chin and dragged him around like a cadet. All he had was “improvise, adapt, and overcome”, but the ARC instructors had never met Siamat. It didn’t seem to be enough.

“I - yes…, I mean, I don’t mind sharing with you,” said Junker, not entirely truthfully.. “What was this about corroboration?”

“Okay,” Siamat said, slightly startled. She’d have to find clean sheets, fuck it. “This is what I have now - you want to lie down again? I’ll dupe up here.”

“Sure.” He had to reset the haptic couch’s ergonomics to fit again. It was odd, realising how many other things must have to be adjustable.

“The financials seem to match up - this part is public record because of how they get the funding from the Senate - and we can calculate some metrics based on that, so it looks like - yeah. You’re good at this, aren’t you?”

The best thing, thought Junker, was that she didn’t sound surprised. She sounded pleased, maybe even admiring.

“This shell company means that Tarkin’s involved,” she said, highlighting one entry. “He’s horrible. Looks like his own corpse.”

“Ma’am!”

“What? He does.”

Junker had seen - and had made - quite a few corpses in his time. In his experience, they were not nearly as tidy as Admiral Tarkin. Inside bits tended to be on the outside. Things leaked.

“Maybe a very old and dry one,” he said, doubtfully.

“Dessicated into his own grey husk,” Siamat said with relish. “Anyway. So Tarkin being involved is interesting. He’s ambitious, and rumours say kind’ve a dick to people who aren’t useful to him. Him being interested in developing junior officers is strange, unless he’s trying to buy himself influence worth spending in a couple of decades time.”

“You think he’s planning that far ahead?”

“Maybe. It would be more likely if he wasn’t human standard. Ugh. Time to load up some more crawlers, I think, start looking for some parallels outside the Navy. You want to play some games or something? The living room might not be safe for spectators.” She grimaced. Junker had to admit she was probably right.

“What sort of games?” he asked.

“Depends what you’re in the mood for. I’ve got lots. Stay there.” Siamat got up from her chair and started fiddling with something just behind his head. Junker tried not to tense up, telling himself he was safe. But he couldn’t see what she was doing, and his helmet was off.

“Close your eyes,” she said, but he didn’t dare, and so was blinded when the display flickered and strobed.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he said, forgetting his hands were in the gloves, and nearly tearing them off the arms of the chair as he tried to roll off the couch and cover his eyes simultaneously.

“Shit!” Siamat said, yanking the the display visor off his head. “It’s okay, are you okay, please don’t rip the gloves, fuck me sideways.”

Junker blinked frantically, trying to rid his vision of purple splotches. His hands were nearly out of the gloves now. “The fuck?” he demanded of the black blotch hovering next to him.

“Physical interlock,” it said apologetically. “Parallel setup, so I can play or watch as much rubbish as I like without risking work stuff. I forgot what it’s like under the hood on changeover. I am so fucking sorry. Can you see anything yet?”

“A bit.”

“I should have just lifted it off your head.”

“Flashbang’s worse,” he said.

“Oh,” Siamat said, at a loss. “Does anything help? I would even brave the living room.”

“Only if you take pictures,” said Junker, and cringed, but she was laughing.

“Yanya would kill me,” she said, still giggling. “If you want to slide back under, the games menu should be up.”

“Your cousin,” he said, and halted. “Why don’t you call her by her name?”

“I do?”

“You said her name was Yanoiru.” Junker tried not to sound disapproving.

“Her name is Yanoiru,” Siamat replied, helpfully. “I just call her Yanya.”

“But her name’s Yanoiru,” Junker stopped, struggling to explain. “You should get her name right.”

“Yanya’s my cousin and we’ve know each other since before our hair was cut. What’s wrong with nicknames?”

“Nothing. Just, I don’t know. It’s different. You have to be invited.”

“You can call me Sia if you want. Most of my friends do,” Siamat said, and touched off another round of confusion. “So I couldn’t call you Junya, or Junks or something, unless you asked me to? Jun-jun? Junkster?”

“No!” He looked as horrified as a holodrama dowager who’d seen an ankle.

“That’s sad. You look like a Jun-jun to me.”

“I do not!” he said, in kneejerk outrage before catching the smile sliding across her face. “It’s not nice to tease about names.”

“Your expression, though,” she said unrepentantly, and flicked him a salute. “Junker.”

He reluctantly smiled back. “Maybe don’t joke about it in public.”

“Consider me duly warned,” Siamat said, more seriously. “I won’t fuck around with people’s names until we’re alone in my bedroom and they’re taking their armour off.”

Junker felt the blush climbing up his cheeks, and fumbled for the visor. “Can we play now?”

There were a lot of icons. Junker had no idea what any of them meant, and said so. Siamat shrugged.

“We’ll find something,” she said, although it took more trial and error than she’d thought; he was confused by genre conventions, preferred co-op modes and didn’t want to play anything that involved shooting, or having to kill people.

Eventually they settled on a puzzle game with a co-op mode she’d never played before. If he wasn’t nearly as good as she was, he was considerably less bothered about it than a lot of her acquaintances. Siamat, curious, asked him about it.

“Of course you’re better than me,” he said, confused. “You’ve had more practice.”

“Yes, but -” she halted. “The gloves aren’t sized for you.”

“Wouldn’t matter if they were. Even we don’t learn that fast,” he said, shrugging, and she dropped it.

Yanoiru interrupted them to see if they wanted dinner. She looked suspiciously rumpled for someone who claimed to have been watching holos.

“I could cook,” said Siamat. She’d taught herself over the last few years. Cooking was something she found satisfyingly tangible, a constrast from the layers upon layers of abstraction she usually dealt with at her job.

“There’s leftovers -”

Siamat shrugged. “I don’t mind. There’s enough in the ‘fresher for four, and we need to go out and get more water tomorrow anyway.”

“If you’re sure,” said Yanoiru, gratefully, who hadn’t quite promised Tane a home-cooked meal, but was convinced it would be a pity if he didn’t have one.

“As long as I don’t have to do the dishes.”

“We could do that,” offered Junker. Neither of them was very clear on how to prepare food from scratch, but no one left Kamino without knowing how to scrub.

“Right,” said Siamat, getting up from her chair. “Let’s go see.”

“You two are very food oriented,” Yanoiru said, amused. Both of them were leaning over the kitchen hatch, watching Siamat slice things up. Tane turned around, a little shame-faced.

“There’s not much variety in the GAR,” he said. “You remember the first time you have proper food.”

“Your entire squad knew,” added Junker, unhelpfully.

“Do I want to know?” asked Yanoiru.

“No, and neither did they,” said Junker, ignoring Tane’s glare.

“At least I didn’t throw up inside my helmet,” said Tane.

“You fucker, that was one time.”

“Inside helmet, or into helmet?” asked Siamat, adding things to the pan, and stirring.

“Into my helmet,” Junker said. He’d been trying to be tidy, and had mostly succeeded. Getting the smell out of the inside had taken so many cleaning chemicals he’d gotten a rash all the way around his neck.

“He still can’t drink the green syrupy stuff,” said Tane. “Wintergreen.”

Junker shuddered. The alcohol had been cheap, and a costly mistake. He’d needed to get a lot of his helmet subsystems replaced by a very unimpressed artificer.

“My downfall was spiced Corellian rum,” said Yanoiru sympathetically. “I had to go outside in the cold and find a nice tree to lean on.”

“I remember that!” said Siamat. “You came back in and I tried to give you some more, and you nearly started crying.”

Yanoiru flushed a little. “I was feeling better until you shoved it in my face!”

“You looked so cold and sad. I thought I was helping.”

“I know, just -”

“You’ve got Tane to cuddle up with now,” continued Siamat, keeping her eyes down on the pan. “He’ll keep you warm.”

“Sia!” said Yanoiru, blushing deep and indigo. Junker looked sideways at Tane, who was wearing a smile that suggested he didn’t mind being relegated from a highly trained operative to a heater.

“What?” said her cousin, all wide-eyed innocence. “Dinner’s ready.”


End file.
